MB: At the moment in Britain there is a great hunger for verbatim theatre. Is that a movement you support?

HP: Absolutely. It has produced a lot of good work at the Tricycle and the Royal Court, though I'm alarmed at what has happened to My Name Is Rachel Corrie in New York [the play recently co-edited from Corrie's diaries and letters by Alan Rickman and Guardian features editor Katharine Viner] ... The real fact there, as you know, is that Rachel Corrie was a young American woman who was looking at the Palestinian situation in Israel when one of the bulldozers that was demolishing Palestinian houses ran over and killed her ...

But that play has now been withdrawn by the producing theatre in New York and that is, I think, typical of what is happening more and more in Britain and America: suppression of dissent and the truth. I'd just point to the example of the prohibition of protest within a certain area outside the Houses of Parliament. One woman walked into this zone and read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq of whom at that time there were about 80. She was arrested, fined and now has a criminal record. What she was actually doing, in reading the names of the British dead outside the Houses of Parliament, was reminding people in Parliament of their ultimate responsibility. So the lid was put on her straight away.